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We all now know that as an 18-year-old prep school student in the 1960s, Mitt Romney rounded up a group of friends, assaulted a student who would later come out as gay, pinned him to the ground, and hacked off the hair he had grown long and dyed blond over vacation. Does it really matter what Romney did as a kid almost half a century ago?

No. Not by itself. Almost every teenage boy is a jerk. We all do things in adolescence that we can be ashamed of. The problem is that the story doesn't end there. In the hours since the story came out, Romney has made it worse, in characteristic fashion.

He has laughed it off. He has also insisted he doesn't remember it. Five of his classmates all remembered it. Phillip Maxwell, a fellow student who was there when it happened, told ABC News, "It’s a haunting memory. . . . because when you see somebody who is simply different taken down that way and is terrified and you see that look in their eye you never forget it. And that was what we all walked away with.” The Washington Post article that broke the story quoted several students who remembered the incident all too well. Who could ever forget such a thing? Andrew Sullivan writes, "We have two options: this man is so callous that, unlike all those others involved in this assault, he has forgotten it. Or he is a liar."

It is unbelievable that he couldn't remember at all, but he is definitely callous, too. For a response to the story yesterday, the best he could come up with was, “As to pranks that were played back then, I don’t remember them all, but again, high school days, if I did stupid things, why, I’m afraid I’ve got to say sorry for it.”If I did stupid things. He didn't take the opportunity to say something like, as Joe Klein suggests, "I did a really stupid and terrible thing. Teenage boys sometimes do such things, and deserve to be punished for them. What I most regret is that I never apologized to John, and won’t be able to now that he’s gone, but let me apologize to his family and friends."

Romney's reaction not only seems almost certainly dishonest, it also, together with the anecdote itself, adds to his solid reputation as almost reptilian in his lack of warmth and sympathy for anyone unlike himself or in a situation unlike his own. He has fought that problem throughout his candidacy, but he keeps on only making it worse. And so he again raises questions about his character as a person and therefore as a leader. Furthermore, as Joe Klein writes, Romney's denial of memory and feeble apology

comes during the same week that he claims credit for saving the auto industry, even though he opposed the bailout that made possible the “structured bankruptcy” he favored. It comes the same week that he expresses his opposition to gay marriage, even though he promised to be a more aggressive proponent of gay rights than Ted Kennedy when he ran for the Senate in 1994–of course, it’s possible that Romney has “evolved” in the opposite direction from President Obama, and most Americans, on this issue, but I doubt it. It seems that a day can’t go by without some Romney embarrassment, or bald-faced reversal of a former position. . . . Romney has a near-perfect record of cowardice, obfuscation and downright lies. It shows enormous disrespect for the intelligence of the public.

Many have wondered if the Washington Post didn't cycnically exploit its research by publishing it right after President Obama came out in favor of gay marriage. But whether or not that is true, and beyond whatever a damage an isolated incident so long ago can do on its own, Romney himself has certainly made it worse.